Dear Future Me
by trufflemores
Summary: 'Wally asked me why I write these notes to myself. "To inspire hope," I told him. But really, I do it for one reason: To know that I'm alive.'


**Author's Notes: Unfortunately, ffnet has no "strike-through" option. I would recommend checking out this fic on AO3 for the full effect. I bracketed and removed the italics for the strike-thru remarks here.**

 **Regardless, enjoy!**

Postmarked: April 24, 2024.

 _Dear Past Me,_

 _Let me begin by saying that everyone we loved five years ago is still alive._

 _I'm writing to you because I saw an article about ten years ago that said I was going to die tomorrow._ _I can't change that, but I figured it couldn't hurt to leave a note here._ _The Speed Force safekeeps these things – when you ask it to._ _(Be very,_ _very __careful what you ask the Speed Force to do.)_

 _In real time – whatever that means – it's only eight-thirty in the morning._ (I'm already drinking the last cup of coffee I'll ever have. Seems strange to write it down.) _For the sake of the multiverse, I can't tell you much: I'm wearing a red-and-blue plaid button-down and a dark-wash pair of jeans._ _The shoes I'm wearing are about four years old, but I suspect they're still on your horizon._ _Something to look forward to; these are the best pair of shoes we've ever had._

 _What else can I say?_ _It's misting outside._ _I didn't see the sunrise this morning, which is a bummer, because according to the article I_ (die around 1:30 in the morning) _disappear before sunrise._ _Exact words: "Late last night."_ _That's tonight._ _Weird, huh?_

 _Yeah._ _It's weird to me, too, and I've had almost ten years to get used to the idea._ _I figured that whatever version of me finds this, at least I'll feel better knowing you got a few years to think about this._ _To reflect about what it means._

 _Here's the deal, Past Flash._ _We're not going to make it out of this one._

 _You have from the moment you are reading this until 1:30 AM on April 25, 2024 to live._

 _I used to think it would be useful to know when I was going to die._ _I could prepare for it._ _If I knew I had ninety years in front of me, I could have fucked around for fifty, gotten my shit together at sixty, and finally lived a wild bohemian lifestyle as a withered speedster at the glorious young age of eighty-five._

 _Instead, I learned that I had less than ten years to live._ _And that changed things._

 _See, my timetables –_ _our __timetables – accounted for us living at least forty years._ _Marry, have kids, die in a blaze of glory._ _That was the pessimistic outlook._ _Optimistically, I hoped to live a lot longer._ _We didn't know what the upper limit looked like because we had no idea what speedster lifespans looked like._ _Guess I'll never find out._

 _For some reason thirty-five just isn't enough._

 _I miss being alive already._

 _So, other than depressing the hell out of you – sorry for that, by the way – why am I writing this?_

 _Because I want you to know that however short my life is, or your life isn't, the good we do matters._

 _I'm still going to work today._ _Fourteen years, and I'm still a CSI._ _I wouldn't change it._ _I'm glad my desk is starting to be permanently stained with coffee cup marks and my own disorganized tangle of folders and half-finished reports._ _It looks lived-in._ _If I'm lucky, maybe it'll fossilize._ _It would be one of the few things that'll remain once I walk out._

 _My footprints will not hold up long in the dust._

 _Because you're a scientist you'll appreciate that if I walked on the moon, my footprints would linger until someone else came along and disturbed them._ _On the moon, there are no substantial erosive processes._ _Time stands still._ _There is no life._

 _Life is transient._ _We are transient._

 _I got to walk._ _Maybe my steps didn't linger long enough, and I certainly won't linger long enough, but I got to be here._ _And I got to run._

 _Who knows: by sending this to the Speed Force, I may in fact be creating my own lunar footprints._

 _You might ask, "Why didn't I fight?_ _Why didn't I resist oblivion with every fiber of my being?"_

 _My answer is simple: I will fight._ _I will resist oblivion with every fiber of my being._ _And if I am lucky, I will be that one Barry that escapes, that makes it out._

 _But it's a coin toss._ _And I don't know if I'm on the winning side._

 _Presuming this finds you within the past eight years, then I know – if you're anything like me, which is a big assumption as well – that you know about time remnants._ _I made it this far, but other versions of me did not._

 _Tomorrow, one of us will die._ _Tomorrow, both of us will die._ _Tomorrow, neither of us will die._

 _Either way, I am bound for the gallows, and I could keep my chin up and pretend that I don't care if I'm the one who dies in a blaze of premature glory at age thirty-five, but I do care._ _I care a lot, because I'm still selfish enough to want to wake up tomorrow._

 _I just realized that I'll never fall asleep again._

 _Or, rather, I'll only fall asleep one more time._

 _"_ _Penultimate."_ _The second-to-last._

 _I slept well._ _I'd like to think that's a good sign._

 _Parting remarks:_ (God that sounds final.) _Hug your family._ _Thank Singh in person._ _Laugh over something stupid._ _Take selfies with your friends._ _Leave the assignments unfinished._ _Go to the beach._ _Read a few pages of that book you're halfway through._

 _Live._ _For every second you get._

 _You truly do not know when it's going to end._ _But it's been a good run, and I hope to see you on the other side._

 _One of us will._

. o .

Postmarked: May 23, 2017

 _Dear Future Me,_

 _I finally know how you feel._

 _It's 5:13 AM._ _I have until 8:48 PM to stop Savitar._ _Or he will kill Iris._ (I can't believe I let it get this far.)

 _You said "Everyone we loved five years ago is still alive."_

 _Who dies?_

 _Who dies between this moment and two years from now?_

(The sun is starting to rise. It's beautiful. You deserved this.)

 _Let me know._ _If you can._

 _I need to run._ _I can't catch my breath sitting still._

. o .

Postmarked: March 18, 2046

 _Dear Past Me,_

 _I guess I'm the one._

 _The one who made it, the one who survived, the one who raced back in time and changed our lives forever._

 _When I went back, there were two options that night._ _One was peace._ _The other was war._

 _I am the war._

 _I'm sixty-seven years old now._ _I like to include that._ _It feels like a tribute to the other versions of me who didn't make it here._ _Gratitude._ _Relief._

 _The time stream is not a mirror, Barry._ _It's a portal._ _It shows you two lives: the one where the disaster happened and you died, and the one where the disaster can still be diverted and you, the future you who shouldn't have escaped, broke free._ _Part of you –_ _all __of you – died because in that universe you couldn't escape._ _You were the mirror image._ _Your existence depended solely on your future self traveling back in time._

 _We never forgot the coma, so I needn't describe how real that felt._ _It's like that: your whole sense of reality is perfect, unbroken, right up until the moment when you realize you were, all along, a shadow for some grander, higher order being who broke free._

 _It doesn't make sense._ _It may never._ _But that's how it happens._ _One sinks, the other swims._ _You cannot change which one you are, any more than I can undo the changes that have been made to the timelines._ (Timelines: plural.)

 _We shouldn't be able to do what we do._ _I think that's part of the reason why the time wraiths—_

 _[indecipherable scratched-out words]_

 _Sorry about that._ _I shouldn't – that's one of those golden rules._ _"_ _Don't cause a divergence."_

 _What's a divergence?_

 _You've studied physics._ _You know parent-daughter universe theory: for every action, not only is there an equal and opposite reaction; there is an equal and opposite_ _action_ _._ _For every yes, there is a no._ _It's a binary system on a cosmic scale: I do one thing, a different version of me on some incalculably distant world does the opposite._ _Every single action we ever take plays out somewhere, in different permutations._

 _A divergence is like flipping the switch the wrong way._ _You're supposed to follow the tracks forward._ _If you switch course, then you risk a collision, derailment, an explosion, veering off course forever._ _You risk tragedy._ _Because the original course, wherever it was meant to take you, was stable._ _The train wasn't going to derail itself._

 _You can try to reset it to how things were, but you'll never get back on the original track._ _There's already a train there, plugging away._ _That's the hardest part to swallow; you're in both places._ _You split the train in half._ _There's a time remnant – you – on the train that never switched course, and if that train was destined to hit a wall, that time remnant dies._

 _There's also a different time remnant – still, fundamentally,_ _you_ _–_ _that is on the split train, the opposite action._

 _You don't know which time remnant you are – crash-and-burn or switch-and-survive – until the moment comes._ _And then you either cannot move, or you_ _must_ _move, and the universe splits with that action._

 _That is how I got here._ _I was the Barry that ran._ _But I was also the Barry that burned to death in a blinding flash of white light._

 _Let that sink in for forty years._ _It'll start to make more sense._

 _My advice?_ _Stay the course or even Speed Force cannot help you._

 _Or live, in spite of that._ _Persist, even when you must leave something irreplaceable behind._ _Keep going._

 _Dare to disagree with destiny._

. o .

Postmarked: August 2, 2016

 _Dear Past Me,_

 _Don't do it._

 _Don't do it don't do it don't do it._

 _Tie yourself to the wall, handcuff your wrist to the floor, just don't—_

 _[blacked out text]_

. o .

Postmarked: May 4, 2016

 _Dear Future Me,_

 _I just got your message._

 _You – someone like you – warned me before, when I went to save Mom the first time._ _You held up a hand and shook your head and I listened._

(God I wish I had listened.)

 _It's only been three months._ _Why do I feel so much older?_

 _One thing I've learned: I can't trade places with you._ _Any of you._

 _This is my life._ _I have to live with it now._

 _I'm gonna make it right._

 _I'm going to make you proud._

(I have to hope that's worth something.)

. o .

Postmarked: March 19, 2000

 _Dear Past Me,_

 _I'm sorry I couldn't save both of you._

 _Joe will take good care of you._

. o .

Postmarked: May 28, 2017

 _Dear Future Me,_

 _I forgive you._

 _Because we saved her._

 _We saved Iris._

 _(I'm willing to risk the wrath of a time wraith to say that.)_

. o .

Postmarked: April 25, 2024

 _Dear Past Me,_

 _I found your letter back when you were the Future Me._ _I found your lunar footprints._

 _My options are pretty straightforward._ _I can listen, and follow, and suffer._ _Or I can risk and run and rewrite the future._

 _Nothing is set in stone._

 _I've spent half my life chasing the impossible._ _Trying to fix the past._ _Undoing my mistakes._

 _I can't say I'll be successful this time._ _I truly don't know._

 _But one thing has stuck with me for all of my life_

 _I have to try_ _._

. o .

Postmarked: March 20, 2046

 _Dear Future Me,_

 _I figured out that thing you couldn't tell me._

 _I escaped the time wraiths, but the claws that cut our leg to the bone never healed properly._

 _We don't walk as easily._ _My hip hurts a lot._ _I'm older than I should be._ _I can't run as fast._

 _I never needed to._ _Wally is fast, and Jesse is quick._

 _I am strong._

 _We'll endure._ _Cheers to us, and our families._

. o .

Postmarked: January 14, 2079

 _Dear Past/Future Me,_

 _I'm not living the wild bohemian lifestyle you envisioned._ _And it took me two years of torture to realize your note – "five years from now" – was you trying to be generous._ _You should have said ten, but how could you have known I would discover your letter so soon?_

 _I don't run as fast, and I carry with me the lives of so many others it's hard to believe I wrote these letters._ _When I come here, the Speed Force brings them to me, and it's almost like I get to meet you._

 _Except I am you._ _We're the same people._ _Person._

 _Weird, huh?_

 _Wally asked me why I write these notes to myself._

 _"_ _To inspire hope," I told him._

 _But really, I do it for one reason:_

 _To know that I'm alive._ _Wherever I am, however I fall – I am alive, right now, and I will stay that way._

 _I'm ninety-years-old today._

 _Happy birthday._

 _Here's to many, many more._


End file.
